Among the tropical winter rains of Cabo Frio

Hey!

You might remember from my travel ramblings earlier, that in mid-July 2010, Bryley and me set course for Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, and also visited the 'golden city', Ouro Preto. Back in BH in the evening after our stay in Ouro Preto, we boarded the night bus to make our way to the coast side of the Rio de Janeiro state. Actually, I don't remember much of the bus trip.. which must mean that I did manage to sleep at least a bit, which is quite a feat for me to do on a bus. (All I remember is taking pictures of ourselves wearing the identical Brasil top.. but then again, we have photos of that, haha).

At 6am the next morning we arrived in Cabo Frio, a well-known beach spot in the state of Rio, extremely popular with Brazilians themselves during the summer months. At least, everyone was always talking about going to Cabo Frio.. but there we were, in the middle of the Brazilian winter, arriving at the bus station, with the tropical 'winter' rains descending on the city. Luckily, our friend Fernanda was kind enough as to come pick us up at this early hour; without her it might have been just a bit more difficult to find our way to her place in all that rain ;)

And by rain I mean a downpour! From what I remember (but don't take my word for it, it's been a year... haha), we took a taxi to her apartment, down by the beach, anyways :) Once settled in her cozy place, we all went to sleep again for a couple of hours... after all, it was still pretty early haha, and whatcha gonna do otherwise with all that rain? haha.. But later in the day, we did actually brave the weather to go outside, flapping in our havaianas over the water running down the streets.

There's how much rain there was!


Since there wasn't much point going that way, we didn't even try braving the beach (although we did get a live glimpse of it from the street... and on the TV weather monitor in Fe's house, but the view wasn't encouraging), and set out for the city, hidden under big umbrellas. What we did find was a great havaianas shop, where we all managed to find a good pair for a discount price :) Oh, and the shop assistant guy was totally into Fernanda, hahaha. (Yes, Fe, he was ;-))


In the summer (or likewise weather), Cabo Frio would be a really cool spot to visit. It's got a really cute harbor, with cool boats, pretty houses and green hills on the other side of the water, and all these cafe's and restaurants along the waterside. The city center itself is like any other town (from what I remember of it), but down by the harbor the atmosphere in the summer sunshine must be of party-till-sunrise, haha, as Fernanda was also telling us about... so obviously, I have to come back to Cabo Frio in the summer! ;)

Dancing in the rain in Cabo Frio :)


Despite the weather, we still tried to make the best of our day, buying havaianas, flirting with shop assistants (khem, Fe! hahahaha), dancing with our big umbrellas in the rain down by the harbor, with palm trees as tropical decor in the background... :p

After a while of exploring the city, we came back home for another drying-up break and hanging around. But not for long!



Dancing with Fe :)


Come evening, the weather actually dried up more or less, and it was windy and a bit chilly rather than anything else, so we dressed up (I borrowed Fe's dress... she had the cutest beach clothes with her) and went out to have dinner back by the harbor again. Too bad we couldn't sit out admiring the views of the harbor, as the restaurants were all covered up, but we had a great time having dinner and caipirinhas, of course :) On our way back home among the rather deserted streets of Cabo Frio - the locals were probably not as brave as us to take on the chilly evening - we even stopped by a local cafeteria to have some frozen acaí with granola, Brazilians' favorite sweet-tooth dessert ;) (As much as it is kinda funny to eat something so frozen in such 'cold', haha).

What's a meal without a caipirinha or two? ;)


Well, dreaming of what Cabo Frio would be like in the summer, and especially during Carnaval, we made our way to Fe's apartment, to then continue our journey the next morning to Buzios, to stay with Fe's family there. But what happened there you will find out next time!

Thanks for reading!

Um beijo :)

'Onde está a praia?'

Hey all,

Already a few weeks ago, I thought it would fun to write a short blog entry on this (but didn't get to it yet): languages and, in my specific case, Portuguese. A language that, despite not having just fallen into my lap (I did actually have to make some effort to learn it and still do.. ;)), has made itself present in my life in a more long-term way than I could've imagined back in the day... before I made myself ready for all those overseas adventures, that naive soul, haha..!

Recently while surfing the internet I came across a video of Shakira, the famous singer, giving a short press-conference in Brasilia after meeting with the president of Brazil to discuss the latter's new plans about education for young children. And to my amazement, Shakira was speaking about all these development plans and her enthousiasm about it in... fluent Portuguese!! I did briefly read somewhere sometime ago that it's among her lingual talents, but I didn't actually pay too much attention to that then. But when I heard her talking in Portuguese for several minutes non-stop, with a slight accent of course, but a complete confidence, I was like, woah hang on a minute!! hahaha...

Exactly where and how Shakira, whose native language is Spanish, learned Portuguese as well, I don't know (but would be interested to find out), but coming across this video was in any case like an extra little boost for me that learning Portuguese might actually be really useful! Ok, it's not one of the 6 main UN languages, but I can already tick off 2 of them anyway. And considering Brazil's incessant economic growth and BRIC position, as well as its dominant size within South America, I'd say that it's in fact almost a surprise that Portuguese isn't more popular already. Chinese is, after all, already extremely popular to learn among many people whose eyes are set on the Far East... but why should Portuguese be lagging behind? ;-)

Mid-June, the new University College alumni magazine arrived at my doorstep. This year I wrote an article to be published in it, and guess what it's about? Yeeees, learning a new language, haha! Actually, I wrote up a little personalized guide as to how one might be able to learn a new language in another country in a short while, based on my experience in Brazil. And I philosophised about it a little, too... well, all I've got to say right now is I hope people enjoy(ed) reading it, and who knows it might come in handy for someone someday =)

In fact, I find that knowing Portuguese comes in handy - and funny, in the case below - at rather unexpected moments. For example, a couple of weeks ago I tuned in really randomly to Shania Twain's website (yes, another famous singer), and found a live streaming of a press conference she was giving - but no, not in Portuguese, hahaha! In English... but next to the video there was the twitter account running busy with all these people around the world watching the video at the same time leaving comments. And I found, to my surprise, that it was basically full of Brazilians, some of them even exchanging messages back and forth about the video, all in Portuguese. Some rather entertaining stuff. That was just the randomest thing ever though! I never realized that of all the places, Brazil in particular would be so big on Shania ;)) She's like one of my fav singers from way back in the day, when I was still living in Russia even (so that's at least 10 years!!), and to go to her website and find all these Brazilian Portuguese comments in the twitter thing was just really hilarious for me.

Well, I've come to the end of my post at the moment. I'm not entirely sure what exactly my point is here, I just wanted to babble a bit and share some funny and curious things here on my blog hahaha. And I guess, for me the point is to reinforce and reassure myself of learning Portuguese further, which I will do sem duvidas ;)

Thanks for reading! Hope you'll come back again to check out my blog =)

PS As for the title, it's a word play on the UC alumni magazine's illustration for my article, which had a dude in swim shorts and an iPod, with 'donde esta la playa' written in the speech bubble, hahaha... and as I'm still going to write about some Brazilian beach adventures here soon, I thought, why not head in that direction already ;-)